Hadija's Story: Diaspora, Gender, and Belonging in the Cameroon Grassfields
266
Hadija's Story: Diaspora, Gender, and Belonging in the Cameroon Grassfields
266Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023834 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/13/2017 |
| Pages: | 266 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Hadija's Story
Diaspora, Gender, and Belonging in the Cameroon Grassfields
By Harmony O'Rourke
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Harmony O'RourkeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02383-4
CHAPTER 1
"Worthy Subjects"
IN 1912, FOUR DECADES BEFORE THE YOUNG HADIJA MADE HER appearance in court, German travel painter Ernst Vollbehr captured an intimate scene of Hausa life in the Western Grassfields (Figure 1). Just a short walk away from the German military station at Bamenda, high on a bluff overlooking the countryside below, Vollbehr created an image of a Hausa village, representing it by the tranquil goings-on of a family compound, neatly swept and enclosed by low-lying grasses and a simple wooden fence. Amidst the earthly hues of green and brown, the colorful clothing of Hausas in the foreground presents a significant contrast. Beautifully embroidered white robes and turbans clothe the two men in the painting, one of whom stands alongside a mat, perhaps to begin a daily prayer. The two women wear cloth wraps that are decidedly simpler in cut and design. One of the women sits on a mat, caring for an infant slung on her back. The other keeps her eye on a cooking pot set across the fire as she pounds grains and spices with a large mortar and pestle.
Vollbehr was quite taken by the Hausas living near the station, spending much of his time observing their way of life. In his Mit Pinsel und Palette durch Kamerun, published after his return to Germany, Vollbehr lamented his short stay at Bamenda, writing, "I would have loved to have had weeks to complete the many changing images that surrounded me here at the interesting Hausa area. Nothing more delightful for the painter as the finely shaped, manicured faces of Hausa children with their oriental jewelry, the black-blue painted eyebrows and the colored bodices are rare. The Hausas in their gorgeous, wide, embroidered robes, and with their characteristic, clever heads are worthy subjects for painting." Vollbehr was unique among German colonial travel painters in his desire to create African family portraits, hoping to offer Germany's youth "a taste" of everyday life in the colonies and to show Africa's landscape as an attractive, albeit primitive space. But like many Europeans before and after him, classical Grecian ideas celebrating the lithe body as the most beautiful human form joined with Enlightenment taxonomy to influence how Vollbehr understood Hausas in relation to the majority of Grassfields inhabitants. European travelers generally divided the peoples of Cameroon into three categories — Pygmy, Bantu, and Sudanic — the last of which included Hausas and Fulanis, people deemed more beautiful and in possession of more intelligent minds. In 1893, Captain Curt von Morgen uncouthly mapped this taxonomy onto the new Kamerun colony: "The further from the coast one travels the more beautiful the people become: to put it at is crudest the more they look like human beings. This became even more striking when I encountered the Sudanic peoples of the interior."
Vollbehr's mode of differentiating Sudanic Hausas from Grassfields peoples was arguably just as stark. On one Sunday morning in Bamenda, he arose to observe the hustle and bustle of the large market near the station, later penning: "Thousands of people, often from the most remote villages, had come with their products. Most were in their black and brown nudity. The colored robes of the Hausas brought a lot of life into the mass of dark, moving images. According to my wishes, there were in front of my house about 30 Hausas in robes with cleaned up women and children." For Vollbehr, local Grassfielders were people who seemed to have lost their humanity in the market. The clothed and adorned figures of Hausa men, women, and children, by contrast, were a more perfect representation of African life and provided pleasure to those fortunate enough to look on them. Religion played its part, too. According to Rebekka Habermas, there was general agreement in imperial Germany "that African 'heathens' should be regarded as inferior not only to European Christians, but also the African Muslim population."
As much as Hausas presented "worthy subjects" for art, they were equally worthy of colonization. Vollbehr thought Hausas were like every other African in that they "completely lack[ed] a sense of historical periods," a mode of thought they would need if they were ever to understand the "elements" of Christianity. Colonial travelers before and after Vollbehr would disagree on the nature and impact of the Hausa presence in the Grassfields. Like him they all had a tendency to place Hausas in a state of in-betweenness, of being two things at once. With their attractive appearance, Islamic faith, knowledge of long-distance networks, and occasional role as economic facilitators for the imperial mission, Hausas were civilized but not civilized enough. They were simultaneously agents and competitors, both an asset and a threat, to the cultural and economic goals of colonization. "The government," wrote Vollbehr, was "... not quite so enthusiastic about the Hausas as I am, because they always enrich themselves at the expense of the natives. ... You attract money and values from the German colonies, and in the end they consume what is acquired on English land in their native Northern Nigeria. What the Indians are for the German East the Hausa are for Cameroon and Togo ... the restless nomads who know only one aim: to get rich as quickly as possible...."
Such views were characteristic of colonialism's contradictory tendencies toward Hausas in the Grassfields, whether under German rule in 1912 or under a British administration that would come to take over the western part of the region, including Bamenda, during the First World War. They relied on Hausas to gather intelligence, establish markets, encourage production of local crops for sale, and earn revenue for the state by insisting that Hausas purchase licenses and by taxing them at a higher rate than any other category of people. But Hausas were strangers to the Grassfields after all, with no political power over Grassfields societies. In order to administer colonies as cheaply as possible, that is without the expenditures associated with military force, the stability of colonial regimes relied on perceived traditional social organization, hierarchies, and paramount authority. Hausas' latecomer status excluded them from consideration as traditional inhabitants of the Grassfields.
Germans' colonial ambivalence toward Hausas was further grounded in their tendency to articulate the very condition of everyday Hausa life in paradoxical terms. "They are everywhere and nowhere," declared Vollbehr, thinking that all Hausas maintained a nomadic existence, "always walking ... with livestock, arts, and crafts beads and their very high-quality leather handwork ... to sell." Despite Vollbehr's attention to Hausa settlement and compound life at Bamenda, and despite his interest in the activities and appearance of Hausa men, women, and children, his definition of them as a people rested on male pursuits germane to the occupation of long-distance trade. This characterization belies the fact that the Grassfields of the early twentieth century were home not only to Hausa men who were itinerant merchants but also men and women who were stationary settlers. These settlers earned a living through local trade, the production of crafts and foodstuffs, Qur'anic instruction, musicianship, medicinal and spiritual healing, hunting, and supplying meat, as well as by offering services, lodging, and provisions to peripatetic Hausas. Many of them wished to reside permanently in the Grassfields, people who were not ambiguously "everywhere and nowhere" at once. But the disjunction between reality and perception remained for most Europeans in these early years. Even the compound depicted in the painting lost its sense of dwelling and family life when Swiss Basel missionaries turned Vollbehr's watercolor into a postcard with a caption that read, "They build themselves only very simple huts," those Hausas who "are permanently on the move," those "clever black merchants of Cameroon."
The idea that Hausa bodies constantly dotted the countryside seemed to downplay the fact that members of first-comer Grassfields societies were in motion as well. So fundamental was this perception to the colonial mental map of the region that when a yellow fever epidemic hit the northern part of the Grassfields in 1917, colonial administrative efforts to contain the outbreak centered exclusively on Hausas. The district officer at the time placed the division under quarantine by posting police patrols on "all roads entering the Division from the North" and curtailing "all movements of Hausa." Using his administrative and military contacts, he wrote to officials and chiefs in Banyo, Bafut, Bekom, Bum, Babungo, and Kumbo, to warn all Hausas either to stay where they were or to turn back north. At Bamenda, he quarantined the Hausa settlement, ordering its leader to turn out four new arrivals from Ibi, Ibadan, and Kumbo, and to burn the houses in which they were living. The officer's understanding of Hausa bodies in motion against Grassfields bodies in situ was so deeply held that only Hausas could be fathomed as the human vectors for a disease that was known at the time to be transmitted by mosquitoes.
Europeans thus harbored attitudes toward diasporic Hausas that grew from two related sets of contradictions that together contributed to the masculinization of Hausa diaspora history in the region. First, Europeans defined Hausaness in terms of men, long-distance trade, and continual movement, even though they observed people of different ages, genders, and occupations attempting to carve out permanent spaces for themselves, their friends, and their families. Second, the colonial categorization of all Hausas as nomadic traders positioned them as a singular group of people who had the potential to both advance and destabilize the colonial project. This particular brand of colonial myopia would influence the state's changing political and economic policies toward Hausas in the years to come. Consequently, debates among colonial officials usually ignored the familial aspects of Hausa life at the heart of Vollbehr's watercolor.
While this painting inspires questions about how European categories of knowledge may have shaped Hausa lives in the Grassfields over the course of the colonial period, it also inspires questions about routes and encounters. How and why did the men and women in the painting make their way to the Grassfields and to Bamenda in particular? Did each of them have a home in Northern Nigeria, or did some of them join Hausa corporate groups from other locations? Might some of them have been Grassfielders who sought a new form of belonging in Hausa society? These are some of the questions lying at the heart of this book. This chapter begins the process of exploring them, providing the context for Hausas' entrance and integration into the region in the nineteenth century. It also illuminates how the dominant political and economic objectives of Hausas, Grassfielders, and German colonizers compounded the erasure of African women's work in this history, a factor that has important consequences for the categorization of Hausas as a distinct group of permanent strangers among Grassfields hosts.
* * *
Our story begins in the fifteenth century when most Hausas spoke a variety of Hausa dialects, practiced a polytheist religion, farmed, and produced craft items, cloth, and iron. They lived in the savanna grasslands east of the Niger River — between the Songhai Empire to the west and Bornu to the east. Over the course of the sixteenth century, due to competition over resources and a need for protection from conflict, these Hausa speakers built massive walls encompassing their hamlets and farmlands. These walled towns became places of refuge for groups throughout the region, and eventually the towns' influence transcended the walls that enclosed them. Hausa city-states then emerged, becoming enduring forms of political power and home to diverse groups of immigrants.
With the development of centralized authority came social stratification. An aristocracy (sarkin 'kasa, lit. "chief of the land") formed, and below them were fief-holding officials (masu sarauta). Most people continued as peasant farmers and found themselves in the commoner class (talakawa). Commoners also practiced occupational specialties, working as healers, tailors, leatherworkers, musicians, smiths, and butchers. Slave ownership was ubiquitous, with slave owners drawn from all social classes; inequalities also formed along gendered lines but changed over time with political and social transformation. With the exception of some titled female positions in pre-colonial Hausa society, familial and political organization has generally emphasized patriarchal rule and solidarity among men. Nonetheless, Mary Wren Bivins has reminded us of women's central roles in the cultural and economic life of Hausa society. Linguistic evidence describing women's work and knowledge of food production, for example, demonstrates the significance of women in "the cultural processes so vital to the success of Hausa agriculture and the transformation of a natural environment into a human landscape." Like their male counterparts, women also established craft specialties and participated in trade.
Over time, the vibrant economic activity within Hausas' walled towns attracted the interest of merchants across the trans-Saharan trade network. The Wangara, or Dyula, West Africa's pioneering itinerant merchant group, brought their knowledge of long-distance trade and Islam into Hausas' social and economic world in the sixteenth century. Many Hausas then entered long-distance trading (fatauci) themselves, heading south and west to sell textiles, leather goods, cattle, and jewelry, in exchange for slaves and kola nuts, a bitter stimulant found in the forested regions of West Africa and highly sought after in northern markets. In this process, Hausa became "a language of trade and social contact in West Africa." Though many Hausa traders and some aristocrats converted to Islam, most Hausas did not care to, or, if they did, they incorporated Islamic practices into their indigenous belief system, creating a syncretic form of the religion.
The tie between Hausa identity and Islam strengthened over the course of the nineteenth century, however. Muslim Fulani pastoralists had been living in Hausaland, having migrated there from further west. By the late eighteenth century, some Fulanis formed an Islamic clerical class, but one that was politically disempowered. Those residing in the Hausa state of Gobir were especially marginalized, enduring harassment and growing increasingly frustrated with "the godless ways of the Gobir nobility." Near the turn of the nineteenth century, Usuman dan Fodio led the Fulani in a military jihad that conquered all of Hausaland, culminating with the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate. Despite the fact that Fulanis became the political elite in the nineteenth century, and Islam the religion of the state, Hausa culture and language persisted with most Fulanis becoming "Hausaized." Moses Ochonu argues that the terms Hausa, Hausawa, and 'Kasar Hausa, which refer to "the language, the people, and land of the Hausa respectively," likely originated from dan Fodio's writings. It was he who "homogenized the Hausa-speaking but autonomous peoples of the different Hausa states in what he defined as a collective of bad Muslim rulers and syncretistic Muslim masses." With the jihad, Islam became inscribed as an important marker of Hausa identity such that "being Hausa" in West Africa increasingly became "more about Islamic piety and the ability to speak the language" than about a historical connection to the old Hausa states or to Hausa ancestry. People's references to the Hausa ethnic idiom have therefore varied over time and space as strategies for inclusion or exclusion. Both Ochonu and Steven Pierce note, however, that speaking Hausa and converting to Islam were only "beginning point [s] ... on the path to becoming Hausa," for being Hausa "also encompassed particular ways of living" both within and outside of the Caliphate — as traders or as farmers with specific approaches to agriculture. Today, northern Nigeria and southern Niger are home to 25 million Hausa speakers, while another 15 million people speak Hausa as a second language throughout West Africa.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hadija's Story by Harmony O'Rourke. Copyright © 2017 Harmony O'Rourke. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I1. "Worthy Subjects"2. "People of the North"Part II3. Slave or Daughter?4. First Reversal: Marriage and Enslavement5. Second Reversal: Death and Survival6. Third Reversal: Conflict and JudgmentConclusionGlossaryBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Steers the conversation on Hausa diaspora experiences and Hausa politics of belonging and identity toward recognition of the importance of gender and its expressions in contestations over marriage, morality, and belonging."
An excellent example of how legal cases may be employed to provide evidence of the complicated contradictions of dominant social ideologies, in this case about gender relations in Hausa Grassfields society. An original and important contribution.
Steers the conversation on Hausa diaspora experiences and Hausa politics of belonging and identity toward recognition of the importance of gender and its expressions in contestations over marriage, morality, and belonging.
An excellent example of how legal cases may be employed to provide evidence of the complicated contradictions of dominant social ideologies, in this case about gender relations in Hausa Grassfields society. An original and important contribution.
Steers the conversation on Hausa diaspora experiences and Hausa politics of belonging and identity toward recognition of the importance of gender and its expressions in contestations over marriage, morality, and belonging.